Leadership Spunje » Information Technology

reducing the environmental impact of business: what role can IT play?

Leadership Spunje — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:22:02 +0000

■ Businesses are being compelled to play their part in tackling climate change.

■ While there are lots of activities that can reduce an organisation’s environmental impact, there is no silver bullet.

■ A co-ordinated programme is needed – that addresses not just IT generated emissions but also uses IT to enable a low carbon transformation across the organisation.

With businesses under pressure to act, IT has a vital role to play in the move to a truly low carbon operation.

http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/EU/uk/about/sustainability/green_it_brochure.pdf

At Fujitsu, we believe IT has a crucial role in helping reduce the environmental impact of business. For too long the focus has been on simply reducing the CO2 emissions generated by IT. However, organisations must also consider how IT can be applied as part of a fully co-ordinated transformation programme – to reduce their overall carbon footprint, playing their part in addressing the issue of climate change.

The Business Analyst of Tomorrow (and Now Today) It is a Software Development Revolution

Leadership Spunje — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:35:35 +0000

What I’m saying is that the very concept of how a project is implemented will completely change “in the cloud”; throwing out many of the norms we’ve all grown accustomed to.

http://jisi.dreamblog.jp/

As if that wasn’t enough, there is an even more radical shift on the horizon for the analyst. When we deliver professional services, particularly on smaller or faster projects, the business analyst IS the developer.

The key thing to understand about deep use of cloud technologies is that everything will move faster, and many formerly cryptic highly-technical things will be made easier. The analysts by themselves now will be able to simply and quickly spin up servers. They will be able to provision and customize software all by themselves. They will even be able to maintain it themselves on an ongoing basis.

Digital Marketing: Twitter

Leadership Spunje — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:52:31 +0000

How do you measure the ROI? Should my company be using what may appear to be a free digital marketing facility but in reality does have costs associated with it.

This subject is covered in the next leadership briefing. It gives insights into practical usage of Twitter as a corporate brand builder or lead generator.

http://leadership.spunje.com/leadership-briefings/

This briefing paper has been compiled by the Spunje researcher of the Digital Marketing Spunje and will be available free to all those sign up for leadership briefings

Backup procedure: Seven rules to follow for effective data backups

Leadership Spunje — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:18:43 +0000

Consistency is not merely a virtue when it comes to handling data backups — it’s nearly a necessity. If you don’t consistently handle all aspects of backups and restores in the same way across the organization, then backups become a lot harder to deal with. You could also find yourself facing a nasty, expensive surprise the next time you need those backups.

http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid91_gci1209276,00.html

when you’re responsible for backups on multiple systems, you need not just backup policies, but also a well-understood procedure for setting those policies.

CRM…or Expensive Junk File?

Leadership Spunje — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:23:05 +0000

Many times the system ends up as a repository of large amounts of data, the critical elements of which may be junk.

Their experiences notwithstanding, properly executed CRM implementations can (and do) consistently increase sales results—often in very adverse economies. Thus, it’s well worth taking a look at what separates the success stories from the failures.

http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/content_display/management/e3ie0fe1e4b8826bd93be7c97b293f69fde

To sum up, then, the most valuable set of sales data is often not properly “scrubbed” in a positive way by sales management. Hence the forecasts are unreliable or even misleading.

There is much to be gained by using CRMs, but often the data that can give most impact to the sharp end of the business has a large junk content—and the human factors and lack of management skills outlined above are the culprits.

IT managers struggle to keep up with business demands

Leadership Spunje — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:51:13 +0000

IT managers facing declining budgets and headcounts are struggling to keep up with the changes in the business environment, according to a survey commissioned by email management vendor Mimecast.

The research conducted by market researcher emedia found that out of 250 UK IT managers, 48 per cent dedicated the majority of their time to maintaining systems and technology rather than directing IT strategy and policy.

http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2247428/managers-struggle-align

Investment in technologies that free up resources, such as cloud computing, can remove some of the headache